Authors: Neil Oliver
While he remained pagan, in the face of a Christian emperor blessed by the Pope, the threat of invasion was very real. But
by taking the simple step of accepting Otto’s religion – at least outwardly – he made it impossible for his foe to cross his borders on the pretext of bringing the Word of God to the heathen Danes.
When it came to conversion, it was pragmatism and politics all the way. The Scandinavians might have taken on the new faith to keep up appearances in the wider, ever-changing world – but that is not to say the old ways disappeared overnight. While the Vikings in Iceland chose Christianity in
AD
1000, it was largely to end the conflict that had built up between the old religion and the new. Settlers had arrived from a wide variety of homelands, including Christians from Scotland and Ireland. When the matter came before the Althing for a decision, the law speaker, Thorgeirr, spent a sleepless night before making his pronouncement. For the sake of unity among the people, he said there should be one law and one faith for all Iceland. But while this one faith would be Christian, he said, it would still be permissible for Icelanders to eat horsemeat, abandon unwanted infants to the elements and to continue making sacrifices to their old gods as long as such practices were carried out in secret.
Harald Bluetooth’s claims of having Christianised the Danes in about 965 are further undermined (and deeply at that) by the results of recent archaeological excavations in the town of Ribe. The cathedral that dominates the town today was built between the 1100s and the 1500s, but it stands on the footprints of earlier church buildings. Archaeologists have previously found settlement traces in Ribe dating from early in the eighth century, with houses built on long narrow plots laid out along a street running roughly parallel to the river. It is therefore one of the oldest towns in all of Scandinavia and there is evidence of the presence there of craftsmen making combs, shoes, pottery, bronze tools and amber jewellery. Large volumes of manure
testify to many cattle as well, suggesting a livestock market was in operation from time to time.
More recently, archaeologists have concentrated their efforts on plots of land lying in the shadow of the cathedral itself. Fire had destroyed a number of buildings, providing an unexpected opportunity to investigate the foundation levels. What has been revealed is evidence of a large cemetery, and some of the burials it contains pre-date that venerable building by several centuries.
Dig director Troels Bo Jensen, of the Sydvestjyske Museum, explained that the graves were aligned east to west, as dictated by the Christian tradition. (At the time of the second coming, Jesus Christ is supposed to arrive out of the east – and when he does so, the faithful dead are expected to come back to life and sit up in their graves to greet their redeemer. In order to make sure they are facing in the right direction when the moment comes, Christians are traditionally buried lying on their backs, with their heads pointing west and their feet pointing east.)
Similarly revealing is the absence of grave goods. While pagan Vikings went into the ground accompanied by all the possessions they might need and want in the afterlife, Christians were instructed to face their Maker empty-handed. Since they had come into life with nothing, it was only right and proper they should leave the same way. For a while, in the early days of the new faith, there was a blurring of boundaries and a mixing of traditions, and some early Christians were buried with keepsakes of one kind or another. But as the faith took proper hold, and was formalised in all its details, the dead were simply wrapped in plain funeral shrouds before being laid inside their coffins, arms by their sides or crossed on their chests.
Pagan burials were often within settlements, with no clear demarcation of the territory of the living and that of the dead. Christian burial grounds by contrast were places set apart from everyday life, in specially consecrated ground separated
from the land of the living by a wall or ditch that acted as a ritual as well as physical boundary. The discovery of just such a boundary line around the Ribe cemetery is further evidence of Christianity.
What is truly startling about some of the newly discovered graves, however, is their age. Troels explained that radiocarbon dates from timber and other organic materials recovered so far reveal some of them went into the ground as early as
AD
850 – meaning there were Christians living and dying in Denmark the best part of a century before Harald Bluetooth was even born. ‘It is a privilege to be working here,’ said Troels. ‘We learnt at school that it was Harald who made Denmark Christian. What we are finding here is rewriting the history of our country.’
Some of the graves excavated by Troels and his team are quite unique. While they have some of the hallmarks of Christian burial – wooden coffins, bodies laid out flat on their backs and orientated east to west – there are also unexpected discoveries like ship’s rivets. Explanations are yet to be found for their presence in burial contexts but it seems possible that some of Ribe’s early Christians were choosing to cling on to elements of the old ways, the iron rivets suggesting coffins styled as boats, or even
made
from boats.
Although granted Christian burials, much else about the occupants of the graves resists discovery. Isotope analysis of teeth may help determine whether they were Danish born and bred, or immigrants from elsewhere. Ribe was established as a trading town and would have attracted foreigners from the very beginning, Christians among them. Some of the dead may have been merchants from England, or other parts of Europe, who died while overseas and were then granted the appropriate burial rites by like-minded family or friends. Such an explanation would work best if the burials were scarce, however, and excavation so far has identified at least 40 Christians. Troels
believes they will shortly have over 100 such graves in the vicinity of the cathedral, and so the possibility of a Christian community established within Ribe by the middle of the ninth century is looking increasingly likely.
Given that Ansgar, the so-called ‘Apostle of the North’ (no doubt accompanied by others of his ilk), was apparently at work in Denmark from the 820s onwards, it is not unreasonable to allow for the presence of converts by 850 – even if they were subject to persecution by the likes of Gorm and his son. As well as taking steps to safeguard his kingdom, Harald was also responding to a cultural and spiritual change that was affecting all of north-western Europe. By the time those first Christians were being buried in Ribe, Denmark was already emerging as a rich, modern European nation. Danish mints were producing coins on the model of those being made elsewhere. Cargo was on the move in ships built to the very latest designs.
Christianity also brought literacy, the special magic that made words permanent. What had been merely ephemeral thoughts and speech could now be transformed into something lasting, that might be copied and circulated. A literate king – or one who at least had literate people in his service – could make his wishes and demands known far and wide. Literacy provided the basis for written contracts, laws and treaties and so enabled kings, and therefore governments, to ensure their wishes were understood and their orders obeyed. As a free gift that came alongside baptism, it was one worth having. Harald was doing no more than move with the times. Since he was surrounded by Christian kings it made sense for him to accept the new religion as well.
While the pagan religion was relatively tolerant of other gods, Christianity would brook no dissent. Accordingly, the obvious signs of the old ways had to be put out sight at best, or utterly destroyed at worst. So while the odd bit of blood-letting
might have been allowed to go on behind closed doors, as well as the consumption of proscribed foods, the sacred sites dedicated to pagan gods had no place in a Christian nation. With that in mind, the obliteration of the ancient ship setting at Jelling would have been a prerequisite for Harald. And once the bones of Gorm the Old had been removed from their mound and rehoused in the body of the kirk, then the green hills could be tolerated as the cenotaphs they were – empty monuments to a buried past.
Harald also demonstrated his power and prestige by investing time and resources in large-scale building projects in his kingdom. While matters spiritual were being taken care of at Jelling, more earthly concerns were addressed by embarking upon the creation of an infrastructure.
Denmark already had what amounted to a main road. The
Hærvejen
or ‘Army Road’ was an ancient feature, some of it dating back thousands of years. Like a spine, it ran north to south along the length of the Jutland peninsula, following the high ground and fording rivers near their sources where they were still shallow. For the most part it was just a trackway, defined only by the footsteps and hoofprints of people and animals, but where the ground was naturally soft or waterlogged a surface of timber and brushwood was laid down to provide firm, dry footing.
Viborg and Jelling, two of Denmark’s oldest towns, lay on the Hærvejen, and Harald would have been accustomed to travelling along it on the approach to his capital. It is therefore highly likely that he was the king (and it must have been a king) who commissioned the Ravning Edge bridge, a grandiose crossing on the Vejle River about six miles south of Jelling. Built sometime around
AD
980, it was over 460 feet long and nearly 20 feet wide. More than 1,000 oak posts supported a wooden superstructure capable of taking a weight of almost six tons. By any
standards it was an impressive construction but the fact that it was built in Viking Age Scandinavia is breathtaking. Perhaps Harald wanted to arrive at Jelling in style and he had the power to make that happen, even if it meant harvesting whole forests and monopolising the labour of hundreds of skilled tradesmen for weeks and months on end.
At the same time as he was having his bridge built, Harald also ordered the construction of a series of huge fortresses, known collectively as the
royal
fortresses or the
Trelleborgs.
There are at least four of them in Denmark: Trelleborg in western Sjælland (the first to be investigated and the site that gives its name to the group); Aggersborg in northern Jutland; Fyrkat in north-east Jutland and Nonnebakken on the Island of Fyn. A site identified at Borgeby, in Skåne, also known as Trelleborg, may well belong to the collection as well.
Like the Ravning Edge bridge, the royal fortresses were symbols of power as well as constructions with a practical purpose. All of them conform to the same plan and are so similar, one to another, they might have been built from a blueprint. Each has a perfectly circular interior enclosed by a massive upstanding bank and external ditch. Four entrances pierce the defences, at the cardinal points of the compass, and are connected to each other by two perfectly straight streets that cross at right-angles at the geometric centre of the circle. Each equal quarter of the interior contained a square of longhouses, their long sides gently curved and suggesting the outlines of ships’ hulls.
The Trelleborg fortress on Sjælland was excavated in the 1940s, inside and out. A burial ground was identified just beyond the main ramparts and found to contain the graves of 154 young men, some with weapons. Warrior graves were found at Fyrkat as well, putting it beyond doubt that Trelleborg and the rest had a military function. Everything about them says ‘garrison towns’ and for many years it was thought they must
have been built in advance of Svein Forkbeard’s invasion of England in 1013. More recently, however, archaeologists have made the point that soldiers for an amphibious invasion of the British Isles would have been held in garrisons close to harbours and the sea. With the exception of Aggersborg, located by the harbour town of Aggersund, on the Limfjord, the fortresses dominate inland positions and would have posed all manner of logistical problems for commanders tasked with getting thousands of men onto warships. Furthermore they are all in the north-east of Denmark, facing the Baltic rather than the North Sea.
Tree-ring dating has, anyway, revealed the royal fortresses were built around
AD
980, during the reign not of Svein Forkbeard but of his father, Harald Bluetooth. Nowadays archaeologists believe they were built for control of the locals rather than for the invasion of foreign lands. A king like Harald, keen to reinforce his status and position at every turn, would have needed to police his realm – both to maintain control of the populace and to collect the taxes and agricultural surplus required to pay for extravagant building projects. Whatever their function, they were short-lived. All of the royal fortresses seem to have fallen from use within a generation of their construction.
As well as being an agent of Danish advancement and progress, Harald was also at the mercy of developments and changes elsewhere in the world. He was hardly the only one. All of the Scandinavian countries were embracing the modern world, to a greater or lesser degree, and in so doing made themselves vulnerable to forces beyond their control. Harald worked hard to grow a government from the ground up, and was among the first of his kind to try to do so. As it turned out, the momentum he generated did not outlast him and when he died, around
AD
985, his successors allowed much of his
fledgling infrastructure to fall back into the earth from which it had come.
From the time of its earliest contacts with the East – led in the main by the Swedish Rus – the Scandinavian world had grown increasingly dependent upon Arab silver. From early on the Arab dirhams were identified as containing the purest, most desirable silver and during the decades and centuries to come millions of the coins were funnelled west. Like a supply of oxygen, the flow of silver helped energise the whole area, supplying the power to create nation states.
So when that oxygen supply suddenly began to dwindle, as it certainly did from the middle of the tenth century onwards, Scandinavia – with no natural sources of precious metal – felt the pain more acutely than anywhere else in Europe. By then the main Arabic silver mines were controlled by the Samanid Empire, from its capital in Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan; and as the tenth century wore out, so too did the veins of precious metal. At the start of the Viking Age, the silver content of the dirhams was around 90 per cent, but by the start of the eleventh century it was down to five per cent or less. The Rus merchants stopped accepting the coins and a flow that had once been torrential slowed to a trickle.